CountryBreakfast

Im not going to pull punches on this rant. I am so exhausted by this rhetoric and unfortunately it is pervasive in my personal life and online. I spend most of my productive time reviewing literature on various global issues. Namely land grab discourse, genocide studies, conservation efforts, state development policy, IFI reports etc etc.

Let me tell you something about the lives of rural and Indigenous people in the global south. They get their homes burned down and murdered in their sleep. Their lands are stolen from them with techniques perfected by colonial powers, especially from US settler colonialism.

The state will steal their lands and "preserve it" for use of private capital, for white settlers, or to create a national park or preserves that wealthy foriegners can hunt game and so they can parade to the world how "modern" they are becoming.

If they cannot steal land outright they will use other more complicated manners to incentivise rural people to be tied into market relations, such as dependence on ecotourism or even biochar and other technologies presented as liberatory or as needed due to damages colonialism has done. "A bit of colonialism will help your colonialism problem," if you will.

These relations will contradict and then corrode their lifeways and distracted from effective traditional methods because white tourists don't want to see the cattle of pastoralists when on vacation. They are also shamed by the excess wealth of tourists, and the settlers that facilitate tourism, encouraging them to become more enfranchised into modernity so their lands will either become vulnerable to direct theft or the market relations will mold them into what settlers want them to do for the benifit of their estates.

These extreme minority settlers often own like half of an entire county, while the county next door is over half conservation area. This means fewer lands for grazing and fewer water sources available for rural people. It leads to starvation and death, especially during dry periods such as the current drought in east Africa, all while the state concern trolls about food security and executes the development dance to attract aid and FDI. It also means that lands are degraded by over use because these people are being choked out of their ancestral lands. The state and white settlers then blame the pastoralists and forest dwellers and weaponize Human Rights against them, saying the rural peoples are preventing the states quest for water security as they redirect all waters to metro areas and settler estates.

All of this is the genocidal process of primative accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. It is a privilege I am able to research these situations. It is a privilege that I am able to work with organizations that work with local Tribes on the issues they are concerned about. It is a privilege I am a grad student that is paid to do this, although our union has to fight the university for a fraction of a living wage.

I am not privileged to not vote Blue. It is more like a curse of understanding. Who do you think backs these violent efforts of dispossession? USAID is never far away. The EU is never far away. The IFI are always right there. Conservation as we know it was created in North America to conquer the continent and take the land from Indigenous peoples and it has exported these methods abroad. All of this is supported by institutions and policies that democrats and republicans alike believe in and enable globally. It is supported by finance capital which is the foundation of the present democratic party

Let me tell you what people who vote blue do about this. Kenya or some other post colonial state will massacre people and burn down their homes and create a national park. Netflix will then hire Obama to narrate a docuseriese on the glorious national parks of the world. Blue voters will then consume the erasure and genocide of rural people as feel-good, green(TM) content with satisfaction that the world is becoming a better place. That's it. Then they go vote blue.

Anyone who says I am privileged to not vote blue has no clue or no care regarding how the world works and is a combination being hopelessly US centric, too focused on bourgeoisie partisanship and embarrassingly naive about the world. Voting blue is the opposite of solidarity. The people who say they are not privileged enough to not vote Blue fail to see their own privilege of living in the Disney land of the global north. What ever gains they think Democrats will give them will either never happen or will be cut from the flesh of people they are happy to sacrifice.

I will not be extorted by bourgeoisie partisans. My moral worth and political identify is mine to create, not theirs to demand. My concern is with the fundamental machinations of capital and the devestating impact it has on people while it reproduces itself, and it is most destructive in places far from the minds of democrats regardless of issues in the US. I'm not going to be tricked into supporting a party that enables the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that stands on a foundation of genocide. They only have moral arguments but they do not have moral standing.

The complex has about 6000 jobs when including the neighboring waste complex (not pictured) and the food factory.

The pollution is off the charts. There is no pollution in town but the fact that people go here to work meant I had to double my clinics to keep heath over 90% and life expectancy over 85 years.

But there is so much productivity. Although almost all gets exported. I have no industry that requires plastic yet. I would like to add fertilizer and explosives but my subway system would likley need to be restructured to accommodate more workers, among other things.

Port for exporting fuel, bitumen, plastic, and chemicals.

Pipelines to both borders. It's a lonely vibe.

I want to see a "green city" that works. Maybe try to find some optimal templates.

We don't have to call it that. But I would like to see more attempts at a few things I have yet to see players acheive:

Urban farming - a city that grows a lot of crops and has its own food factory. I have a template I am experimenting on for this but it is hard to keep everyone's needs in walking distance. I don't think it all needs to be grow in the city but the more the better. I currently am experimenting with small fields in residential areas to boost crop production. IMO if there is one industry that should be somewhat decentralized it is food. Greenhouse mods are acceptable although they are not up to date.

Cleaner(er) energy - making a power grid work with only renewables will be a huge challenge that I would love to see. Maybe there can be a limit for one nuclear power plant and bonus points if it's a single reactor, that way there is baseline power but I think you must have your own waste facility.

Waste obviously - recycle as much waste as possible. Incinerator power plants can be acceptable as a 'necessary evil' because, although they are big polluters, you still need a ton of trash for it to run at baseline and it would be irresponsible to export waste and make someone else deal with your trash.

Other than those 3 perameters it is up to the player what goes on in this green city, but the more self sufficient the better.

Please add any suggestions to this idyllic city challenge. I will work on my experiment as I have time and post about it when something is working.

I only care about lemmygrad.ml which as far as I know is where the comrades are. Yall are great. I came here to spew word vomit in consentrated bursts to get 3 up votes at a time. I am blissfully ignorant of technology issues or whatever the hell people are on about with reddit nowadays. I would like to avoid the normcore libs and porn distributors that are flooding the site. I use reddit for cyber bullying those types but here is like a sort of home base.

How do I keep these worlds from colliding?

Probably one of the most complex builder games out there

Not only did it take me back to the Star Wars in my head that existed before the prequels existed but it was the most sobering depiction of struggle that Star Wars has ever achieved on screen. The prison episodes were especially moving.

What do yall think about the show?

Penrose is a physicist that has worked on the great mysteries like cosmology and consciousness. For Penrose, he reluctantly calls himself a materialist because he admits he doesn't know what matter really is even tho he ostensibly is a materialist in practice.

What do you make of this?

In light of the recent "religion" decree on lemmy, how does Penrose's reluctance interact with notions of religon? If there is a non-physical world that interacts with the physical world, then is the non-physical world somehow immaterial? Or could it be material? Can the material be subdivided into "alternative materials" with seperate functions, similar to how structural forces give rise to attitudes, and attitudes give direction to maintain or change structures? Sometimes ideas become so entrenched that they become structural and affect matter beyond what happens in the brain. Similarly, material forces that are not present still affect us (and then those affects re affect us as we contextualize things), for example the actions of our ancestors or the past itself. Furthermore, with any amount of predictive ability, the looming, foreseen future affects the present even though it has not materialized.

Oftentimes we may be off put by a seperation between material and spiritual or non physical, but what if they are still basically the same thing and the distinction is a red herring.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/516254

Over the last several years I have, in song with others, pushed for priorities to be directed toward a “socialism with American characteristics.” The discourse that the quest has generated has often been a disaster. The obvious worst of this being the “patsoc” thinking that has thankfully quieted for the most part. In order to better advance this cause of creating a revolutionary theory, and to combat my personal angst which arises in the face of Maoists trying to force me to read about the Philippines instead of something that could be even more relevant for North America, I believe it would be generative to show an example of how Marxist theory has been used by Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard.

Not entirely unlike how Mao and the communists of China facilitated a “sinophication” of Marxism, some scholars and activists are arguably indigenizing Marxism, or making it “transformed in conversation with critical thought and practices of Indigenous peoples” to make it compatible for North American realities (p. 9).

In his book, Red Skin, White Masks, Coulthard explores the subjectivity that is enforced on Indigenous people by colonialism and the complications that arise. Coulthard may not be an explicit Marxist, he probably does not go around claiming to be ML, his aim is more to mold Marxism into a weapon for Indigenous people and not the other way around. Personally, I find this to be a worthy cause that more should be aware of.

I can’t do justice to a full summary at this time, but to partially summarize the book I will focus primarily on the context shift toward colonialism that Coulthard uses alongside his views on primitive accumulation. Most of this will be from just the introduction. I’ve chosen this because I believe this text provides a bridge between Indigenous thinkers and Marxist thinkers and can be a kind of gateway for a complex topic. Hopefully, this can expose comrades here to Indigenous thinking that can help us understand what is to be done.

Subheading: Into the Weeds

This context shift is a move toward a context of colonial instead of just capital relations by way of primitive accumulation. He defines colonialism as structured dispossession and utilizes chapters 26-32 of Capital vol I to stand on this.

He writes (p.7): In Capital these formative acts of violent dispossession set the stage for the emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production by tearing Indigenous societies, peasants and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood—the land.

Many are already familiar with Primitive Accumulation, but I will attempt to flesh it out regardless. Primitive accumulation often seen as a temporary state of brutality were it forcefully opens up “what were once collectively held territories and resources to privatization” which inevitably leads to proletarianization. It is this violent transformation of non-capitalist relations into capitalist, market relations that constitutes primitive accumulation. Before continuing on to how Coulthard would like to recontextualize primitive accumulation he briefly touches on the fact that Indigenous thinking and Marxist thinking are oftentimes at odds. Part of his goal is to rescue both Indigenous people from the oftentimes racist, chauvinist, reactionary attitudes that Marxists often deploy and rescue Marxism from a “premature rejection” by Indigenous thinkers (p. 8). By doing so (he holds that feminist, queer, anarchist, and post-colonial thinking will be helpful) he believes more light can be shed on colonial domination and resistance.

Transforming Primitive Accumulation

In order to transform Marx’s primitive accumulation, he addresses three problematic features, and several important insights about these features. Some of these criticisms you may already be familiar with.

The first feature is “Marx’s rigidly temporal framing of the phenomenon” (p9). The idea here is that PA (primitive accumulation) is confined to a specific phase in time. For example, in England PA has passed and completed but in the colonies PA is present. Along with many other Marxian thinkers (like Harvey et al), a persistent role of PA is what we should see, and certainly with neoliberal hegemony. “[U]nconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts” (p9).

The second feature is normative developmentalism. This is basically what was especially present in early Marx, a modernist view of history. This leads some of Marx’s work to portray PA as a historical inevitability that is apart of a historical metanarrative. Coulthard seeks to rescue Marx from this fallacy by shifting emphasis from capital relations to colonial relations.

Marx sees PA as a process of dispossession that leads to proletarianization. His concern was with understanding capital as a social relation dependent on the separation of workers from the means of production. Thus Marx was not nearly as preoccupied with dispossession as he was with arriving at proletarianization as a focus (p11).

He writes (p11): By repositioning the colonial frame as our overarching lens of analysis it becomes far more difficult to justify in antiquated developmental terms (from either the right or left) the assimilation of non-capitalist, non-Western, Indigenous modes of life based on the racist assumption that this assimilation will somehow magically redeem itself by bringing the fruits of capitalist modernity into the supposedly ‘backward’ world of the colonized.

This is something late Marx was more comfortable with. However, his point is well taken. I personally have seen “patsocs” of the last few years attempt to say what happened to Indigenous people was merely them being added to the work force. Proletarianization, but ignoring the colonial relations in order to assert this was a natural and inevitable event, even a desirable one. Also, I find that within the academy, Marx is often taught as a snapshot of his early self, so this criticism is good for those who have been confined to early Marx (Tangentially I think the academy misrepresents Marx’s totality regularly so its good to have criticisms that are not based in liberal chauvinisms.) It is evident that “egalitarian” voices will use modernist fallacies to reproduce dispossession. For example, advocates who seek a return of the commons fail to understand that there are no “commons” in Canada or the US. There is only the land of the First Peoples.

He writes (pg12) By ignoring or downplaying the injustice of colonial dispossession, critical theory and left political strategy not only risks becoming complicit in the very structures and processes of domination that it out to oppose, but it also risks overlooking what could probe to be invaluable glimpses into the ethical practices and preconditions required for the construction of a more just and sustainable world order.

Further insight into this critique regards the role of Indigenous labor. As industrial capitalism matured in North America, Indigenous labor was rendered increasingly (though not entirely) superfluous. This helps us furthure understand why the context of colonial relations and the emphasis on dispossession can illuminate more than the normative developmentalist views that prioritize proletarianization can.

Forgive my metaphor, but in many ways the civilization policies that were levied against Indigenous peoples were the John the Baptist that preceded the Christ of industrialism. This is seen in how slavery was spread through Henry Knox’s civilization policy, something I’d be happy to post about separately another time. As Canada’s commissioner of Indian Affairs wrote in 1890, “The work of sub-dividing reserves has begun in earnest. The policy of destroying the tribal or communist system is assailed in every possible way and every effort has been made to implant a spirit of individual responsibility instead.”

(Note the red scare language. This is something that is present throughout the history of Indigenous resistance to colonialism.)

However, you could point to proletarianization as a distraction, usually it is said dispossession was meant to facilitate proletarianization, but for Indigenous people dispossession was meant to acquire land and resources for capital. Dispossession is the “dominant background structure” and “continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance (p13).”

He writes further: (p13) The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondomination and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as ‘rightless proletarians.”

Grounded normativity cannot be stressed enough as a key for understanding pan-Indigenous philosophies and how they can interact with Marxism. For Indigenous philosophers, ethics cannot be simply separated from cosmology, or from anything, certainly not from land. The universe itself has a moral character that is revealed by co-relationality. I would recommend works by Vine Deloria Jr and Richard Atleo to have a better feel for how this works although Coulthard himself gives good insights himself later in the book.

For now, grounded normativity can by defined as “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (p13). I will focus on this more in later posts if I can.

Another insight into normative developmentalism that is briefly mentioned, is that it doesn’t always see the land itself as exploitable, people are. There is a tendency to deploy poor understandings of the environment and a presumption that Marxism is designed to ignore ecocriticism. I did not go into detail about grounded normativity, but we can already see that if we see Land as a system of relations then this anti-environmental tendency is problematic for Indigenous thinking in unique ways even when it is routinely levied by ecological thinkers. A final insight into normative developmentalism is economic reductionism. I’ll let quotes take this one as other authors tackle this regularly and I’d rather his voice shine for this article.

He writes: (pg 14-15) …the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus or base from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and stat relations converge to facilitate a certain power effect—in our case, the reproduction of hierarchical social relations that facilitate the dispossession of our lands and self-determining capacities. Like capital, colonialism, as a structure of domination predicated on dispossession, is not ‘a thing,’ but rather the sum effect of the diversity of inter locking oppressive social relations that constitute it.” Basically, shifting toward colonial relations doesn’t “displace” class struggle, but “situates these questions more firmly alongside and in relation to the other sites and relations of power that inform our settler-colonial present.”

OK so now on to the 3rd and final problematic feature. Which is more of a question on governmentality. This one is interesting because I think his peers have pushed against this. Basically, he believes that because the liberal Canadian state is developing less overtly brutal methods of subjugation it differs from the explicitly and incredible violence that Marx asserts goes hand in hand with primitive accumulation—as Marx says, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt.”

He asks readers: (p15) What are we to make of contexts where state violence no longer constitutes the regulative norm governing the process of colonial dispossession, as appears to be the case in ostensibly tolerant, multinational, liberal settler polities such as Canada? Stated in Marx’s own terms, if neither ‘blood and fire’ nor the ‘silent compulsion’ of capitalist economics can adequately account for the reproduction of colonial hierarchies in liberal democratic contexts, what can?

I take this as more of a question of understanding what the state is up to than a statement that violence has lost its place in primitive accumulation. Much of the book is about “recognition” and how relying on state recognition is bunk, so in that light, it makes sense to me to ask these questions in hopes of understanding the role that pursuing state recognition plays in primitive accumulation. But clearly violence is still the status quo for Indigenous people, thus I find this to be his weakest but most intriguing point.

Conclusion

So, I have laid out Coulthard’s initial points on primitive accumulation. In the future I hope to make a post on more parts of this book, and maybe others as well. I especially intend to flesh out grounded normativity and recognition, which the book is mostly about in the first place as I think these can be helpful concepts for comrades.

Over the last several years I have, in song with others, pushed for priorities to be directed toward a “socialism with American characteristics.” The discourse that the quest has generated has often been a disaster. The obvious worst of this being the “patsoc” thinking that has thankfully quieted for the most part. In order to better advance this cause of creating a revolutionary theory, and to combat my personal angst which arises in the face of Maoists trying to force me to read about the Philippines instead of something that could be even more relevant for North America, I believe it would be generative to show an example of how Marxist theory has been used by Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard.

Not entirely unlike how Mao and the communists of China facilitated a “sinophication” of Marxism, some scholars and activists are arguably indigenizing Marxism, or making it “transformed in conversation with critical thought and practices of Indigenous peoples” to make it compatible for North American realities (p. 9).

In his book, Red Skin, White Masks, Coulthard explores the subjectivity that is enforced on Indigenous people by colonialism and the complications that arise. Coulthard may not be an explicit Marxist, he probably does not go around claiming to be ML, his aim is more to mold Marxism into a weapon for Indigenous people and not the other way around. Personally, I find this to be a worthy cause that more should be aware of.

I can’t do justice to a full summary at this time, but to partially summarize the book I will focus primarily on the context shift toward colonialism that Coulthard uses alongside his views on primitive accumulation. Most of this will be from just the introduction. I’ve chosen this because I believe this text provides a bridge between Indigenous thinkers and Marxist thinkers and can be a kind of gateway for a complex topic. Hopefully, this can expose comrades here to Indigenous thinking that can help us understand what is to be done.

Subheading: Into the Weeds

This context shift is a move toward a context of colonial instead of just capital relations by way of primitive accumulation. He defines colonialism as structured dispossession and utilizes chapters 26-32 of Capital vol I to stand on this.

He writes (p.7): In Capital these formative acts of violent dispossession set the stage for the emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production by tearing Indigenous societies, peasants and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood—the land.

Many are already familiar with Primitive Accumulation, but I will attempt to flesh it out regardless. Primitive accumulation often seen as a temporary state of brutality were it forcefully opens up “what were once collectively held territories and resources to privatization” which inevitably leads to proletarianization. It is this violent transformation of non-capitalist relations into capitalist, market relations that constitutes primitive accumulation. Before continuing on to how Coulthard would like to recontextualize primitive accumulation he briefly touches on the fact that Indigenous thinking and Marxist thinking are oftentimes at odds. Part of his goal is to rescue both Indigenous people from the oftentimes racist, chauvinist, reactionary attitudes that Marxists often deploy and rescue Marxism from a “premature rejection” by Indigenous thinkers (p. 8). By doing so (he holds that feminist, queer, anarchist, and post-colonial thinking will be helpful) he believes more light can be shed on colonial domination and resistance.

Transforming Primitive Accumulation

In order to transform Marx’s primitive accumulation, he addresses three problematic features, and several important insights about these features. Some of these criticisms you may already be familiar with.

The first feature is “Marx’s rigidly temporal framing of the phenomenon” (p9). The idea here is that PA (primitive accumulation) is confined to a specific phase in time. For example, in England PA has passed and completed but in the colonies PA is present. Along with many other Marxian thinkers (like Harvey et al), a persistent role of PA is what we should see, and certainly with neoliberal hegemony. “[U]nconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts” (p9).

The second feature is normative developmentalism. This is basically what was especially present in early Marx, a modernist view of history. This leads some of Marx’s work to portray PA as a historical inevitability that is apart of a historical metanarrative. Coulthard seeks to rescue Marx from this fallacy by shifting emphasis from capital relations to colonial relations.

Marx sees PA as a process of dispossession that leads to proletarianization. His concern was with understanding capital as a social relation dependent on the separation of workers from the means of production. Thus Marx was not nearly as preoccupied with dispossession as he was with arriving at proletarianization as a focus (p11).

He writes (p11): By repositioning the colonial frame as our overarching lens of analysis it becomes far more difficult to justify in antiquated developmental terms (from either the right or left) the assimilation of non-capitalist, non-Western, Indigenous modes of life based on the racist assumption that this assimilation will somehow magically redeem itself by bringing the fruits of capitalist modernity into the supposedly ‘backward’ world of the colonized.

This is something late Marx was more comfortable with. However, his point is well taken. I personally have seen “patsocs” of the last few years attempt to say what happened to Indigenous people was merely them being added to the work force. Proletarianization, but ignoring the colonial relations in order to assert this was a natural and inevitable event, even a desirable one. Also, I find that within the academy, Marx is often taught as a snapshot of his early self, so this criticism is good for those who have been confined to early Marx (Tangentially I think the academy misrepresents Marx’s totality regularly so its good to have criticisms that are not based in liberal chauvinisms.) It is evident that “egalitarian” voices will use modernist fallacies to reproduce dispossession. For example, advocates who seek a return of the commons fail to understand that there are no “commons” in Canada or the US. There is only the land of the First Peoples.

He writes (pg12) By ignoring or downplaying the injustice of colonial dispossession, critical theory and left political strategy not only risks becoming complicit in the very structures and processes of domination that it out to oppose, but it also risks overlooking what could probe to be invaluable glimpses into the ethical practices and preconditions required for the construction of a more just and sustainable world order.

Further insight into this critique regards the role of Indigenous labor. As industrial capitalism matured in North America, Indigenous labor was rendered increasingly (though not entirely) superfluous. This helps us furthure understand why the context of colonial relations and the emphasis on dispossession can illuminate more than the normative developmentalist views that prioritize proletarianization can.

Forgive my metaphor, but in many ways the civilization policies that were levied against Indigenous peoples were the John the Baptist that preceded the Christ of industrialism. This is seen in how slavery was spread through Henry Knox's civilization policy, something I'd be happy to post about separately another time. As Canada’s commissioner of Indian Affairs wrote in 1890, “The work of sub-dividing reserves has begun in earnest. The policy of destroying the tribal or communist system is assailed in every possible way and every effort has been made to implant a spirit of individual responsibility instead.”

(Note the red scare language. This is something that is present throughout the history of Indigenous resistance to colonialism.)

However, you could point to proletarianization as a distraction, usually it is said dispossession was meant to facilitate proletarianization, but for Indigenous people dispossession was meant to acquire land and resources for capital. Dispossession is the “dominant background structure” and “continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance (p13).”

He writes further: (p13) The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondomination and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as ‘rightless proletarians.”

Grounded normativity cannot be stressed enough as a key for understanding pan-Indigenous philosophies and how they can interact with Marxism. For Indigenous philosophers, ethics cannot be simply separated from cosmology, or from anything, certainly not from land. The universe itself has a moral character that is revealed by co-relationality. I would recommend works by Vine Deloria Jr and Richard Atleo to have a better feel for how this works although Coulthard himself gives good insights himself later in the book.

For now, grounded normativity can by defined as “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (p13). I will focus on this more in later posts if I can.

Another insight into normative developmentalism that is briefly mentioned, is that it doesn’t always see the land itself as exploitable, people are. There is a tendency to deploy poor understandings of the environment and a presumption that Marxism is designed to ignore ecocriticism. I did not go into detail about grounded normativity, but we can already see that if we see Land as a system of relations then this anti-environmental tendency is problematic for Indigenous thinking in unique ways even when it is routinely levied by ecological thinkers.

A final insight into normative developmentalism is economic reductionism. I’ll let quotes take this one as other authors tackle this regularly and I’d rather his voice shine for this article.

He writes: (pg 14-15) …the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus or base from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations converge to facilitate a certain power effect—in our case, the reproduction of hierarchical social relations that facilitate the dispossession of our lands and self-determining capacities. Like capital, colonialism, as a structure of domination predicated on dispossession, is not ‘a thing,’ but rather the sum effect of the diversity of inter locking oppressive social relations that constitute it.” Basically, shifting toward colonial relations doesn’t “displace” class struggle, but “situates these questions more firmly alongside and in relation to the other sites and relations of power that inform our settler-colonial present.”

OK so now on to the 3rd and final problematic feature. Which is more of a question on governmentality. This one is interesting because I think his peers have pushed against this. Basically, he believes that because the liberal Canadian state is developing less overtly brutal methods of subjugation it differs from the explicit and incredible violence that Marx asserts goes hand in hand with primitive accumulation—as Marx says, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt.”

He asks readers: (p15) What are we to make of contexts where state violence no longer constitutes the regulative norm governing the process of colonial dispossession, as appears to be the case in ostensibly tolerant, multinational, liberal settler polities such as Canada? Stated in Marx’s own terms, if neither ‘blood and fire’ nor the ‘silent compulsion’ of capitalist economics can adequately account for the reproduction of colonial hierarchies in liberal democratic contexts, what can?

I take this as more of a question of understanding what the state is up to than a statement that violence has lost its place in primitive accumulation. Much of the book is about "recognition" and how relying on state recognition is bunk, so in that light, it makes sense to me to ask these questions in hopes of understanding the role that pursuing state recognition plays in primitive accumulation. But clearly violence is still the status quo for Indigenous people, thus I find this to be his weakest but most intriguing point.

Conclusion

So, I have laid out Coulthard’s initial points on primitive accumulation. In the future I hope to make a post on more parts of this book, and maybe others as well. I especially intend to flesh out grounded normativity and recognition, which the book is mostly about in the first place as I think these can be helpful concepts for comrades.

Edit: this article is the source